Wednesday, December 11, 2013

עבודה זרה

After
you've lived here for a while there's all kinds of stuff you take for
granted. I guess you can say that at some point some of the freshness
wears off and you've got to take a leap back to where you came from
to remember that you are indeed a stranger is a strange land.

For
example.

Here
we are building this house, and so we've got a team of workers who
are living on the property in a hut they built, cooking in a
makeshift kitchen and shitting in a hole in the ground outhouse they
dug.

In
other words, Tony is not going home every evening to his wife and
kids in Stony Creek.

Also,
at one point the workers will absolutely refuse to work unless a
group of monks come and bless the construction work. The ceremony was
very touching. This is how it went:

The
Shaman comes and sets everything up. Candles and flowers and a little
box with different compartments to represent the house and all the
rooms. The people who will live in the house are measured with strips
of candle, an arm's length, around the head and from the sternum to
the navel.

Then
all these candle lengths are squeezed and woven together to make one
big thick yellow candle like a havdalah candle. Because the land is
on a lake and because naga monsters can surge from the lake
like medieval dragons, extra care and prayers have to be applied.

The
monks arrive in dignified procession, their robes shining, and they
take up their place in the workers' living quarters to recite
incantations, drink Pepsi and check their messages on their
smart-phones.

Remember,
if we don't do this, the workers will simply strike. It would be the
Canadian equivalent of Tony fetching a priest to bless a construction
site and refusing to work until the last drop of holy water was sprinkled.

Stones
with mystical incantations representing each member of the family are
placed in the four corners of the house and a bamboo fish net filled
with cash and other symbols of happiness is affixed to the “mother
pillar”.

In
the end, a white cotton thread was strung all around the house and
the monks place a miniature pagoda at the base of every corner
pillar.

I
have to admit that I found the ceremony to be very moving; almost as
moving as our wedding ceremony. The thought that Marie-Do and I had
later that day was that in any of the monotheistic religions the
priest or rabbi would require all kinds of understanding and
commitments before doing a ceremony, especially for people from
outside the tribe in question. Nowadays priests in Québec, for
example, are refusing to marry people in a church unless they go to
mass every Sunday.

Here,
the experience was quite the opposite. Our understanding or belonging
counted not one bit. We were told what to do and where to sit and
that was all that was required of us. Like any thinking people we are
invited by Reality to understand or question whatever we want. We can
accept blindly or just go through the motions ... it matters not one
bit. The Shaman did what he had to do, the monks did what they had to
do, we did what we had to do. The workers for whom this ceremony was
of such capital importance totally ignored its existence: they kept
on working or sat around smoking cigarettes not at all concerned by
the placated spirits or swimming naga.